The shots came on a hot June night in 1906, on the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, fired at close range into the face of the most celebrated architect in America. Stanford White died instantly at his table, and the man holding the gun was Harry Kendall Thaw, the millionaire husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the former chorus girl at the center of the scandal. Evelyn Nesbit was 21 years old that night. She had been one of the most photographed faces in the country since her teens, yet she controlled almost nothing in her own life.
The killing would make her the most talked-about woman in America, and the trial that followed would force her to relive, in open court, the worst night of her childhood. She was born on Christmas Day in 1884 near Pittsburgh, the daughter of an attorney who died suddenly when she was about ten, leaving the family in debt. Her mother took in boarders, sewed, and worked behind a department store counter, but the money was never enough. Evelyn later remembered her mother as always worried about the rent.
As a young teenager in Philadelphia, she was noticed by an artist who offered her a dollar for five hours of posing. It was more than a shopgirl could earn in a day, and she pushed to be allowed to pose for a living. Her face soon appeared in the studios of leading artists, on magazine covers, calendars, postcards, and advertising. She became one of the first American faces to be mass-produced in the new age of reproduced images.
In the summer of 1901, she joined the chorus of a hit Broadway musical and was soon given featured parts. Wealthy men treated the stage door as a marketplace, sending flowers and invitations. Stanford White, the architect who designed Madison Square Garden and many of the era’s most famous buildings, took an interest in her when she was 16. White presented himself as a benefactor.
He moved the Nesbit family into comfortable quarters, furnished the rooms, and paid to send Evelyn’s younger brother to a military academy. He encouraged her mother to take a trip to Pittsburgh, leaving Evelyn in his care. According to her sworn testimony, White then gave her champagne in his tower apartment, and her memory stopped. When she woke, she was in a mirrored bedroom, naked, with White beside her, and she understood she had been violated.
She stayed with him for months afterward. She later said for the rest of her life that White was the most wonderful man she ever knew, a claim that historians have read as the response of a dependent girl bound to her abuser by shame and gratitude. White kept other young women, and Evelyn learned she was not singular to him. A brief romance with the young John Barrymore was ended by White and her mother, both of whom preferred the profitable arrangement.
In early 1903, she underwent an operation described as an appendicitis; some descendants later speculated it may have been a pregnancy quietly ended, but the record does not settle the question. Soon after, Harry Kendall Thaw entered her life. Thaw was the heir to a vast Pittsburgh fortune built on coal and railroads. He had a documented history of instability, violence, and cruelty, and he had become fixated on Stanford White months before he ever met Evelyn.
He courted her under a false name and pressed her endlessly for details of what White had done to her. In 1903, Thaw took her to Europe. According to Evelyn’s later testimony, he locked her in a room in an Austrian castle, beat her with a whip, and assaulted her over a period of about two weeks, then became gentle and contrite. She married him anyway in April 1905, wearing a black traveling suit he chose, refusing her any white.
The marriage brought her into one of the largest fortunes in the country, but she controlled none of it. She lived in the Thaw family home in Pittsburgh under the cold watch of her mother-in-law, with no money of her own, no work, and no way to leave. Thaw’s obsession with White deepened into a mission. He gathered stories, contacted the moral reformer Anthony Comstock, and came to believe White had set men to follow him.
On June 25, 1906, the Thaws dined at a restaurant where White was also eating, then went to the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden for a summer musical. White arrived late and took a seat near the stage. During the finale, Thaw rose from his table, crossed to White, and fired three shots into his face from about two feet away. White died instantly.
Thaw made no attempt to flee. The defense at Thaw’s first trial argued temporary insanity. Evelyn was put on the stand for days and made to describe, before a courtroom packed with men, the night she was violated six years earlier. The first jury was unable to agree, and a mistrial was declared.
At the second trial in 1908, the defense introduced a theory it called “dementia Americana,” a supposed madness that overtook a man who learned his wife’s virtue had been despoiled. The jury found Thaw not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, where he arranged comfortable quarters, including a brass bed and tailored clothing. Years later, he simply walked out and fled to Canada, was caught and returned, and was eventually declared sane and released with his fortune intact.
When he died in Florida in 1947, he left Evelyn $10,000. Evelyn was abandoned by the Thaw family once the verdict was won. She had given them her testimony and her privacy, and received a fraction of what had been implied. She gave some of the money away to the radical Emma Goldman, according to a family account, out of spite toward the Thaws.
She gave birth to a son, Russell, in 1910, and maintained the boy was Thaw’s; Thaw denied it for the rest of his life. She built a vaudeville act and drew large crowds, trading on notoriety. She was billed as the girl in the red velvet swing, the swing from White’s hidden room. She married her dancing partner, Jack Clifford, but the marriage ended, as her fame was too heavy for the men beside her to carry.
She later ran tea rooms and nightclubs, and wrote two memoirs. Her later decades were marked by decline. She struggled with drink and morphine, and twice attempted suicide, once surviving a dose of disinfectant only because her stomach was full of gin. In her hardest years, Thaw paid her a small daily allowance through a lawyer, and they were photographed together, though nothing came of talk of remarriage.
In her final years, she moved to California near her son and studied sculpture, teaching strangers to shape clay. Few of her students knew her name. In the mid-1950s, a Hollywood film based on her story was made, called The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. She was hired as an adviser and paid $10,000, the same sum Thaw had left her.
She died in January 1967 at the age of 82, in a nursing home in Santa Monica. She once said of her own life that Stanford White was killed, but her fate was worse: she lived. The men who ruined her died comfortable and were remembered kindly, while she carried the weight of the scandal for sixty more years.